Cool Student Blog

I was searching for some graphics to go with a poster I have to do for this studio class and I stumbled upon a really neat blog created by architecture students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. This is worth checking out: these guys are really sharp, they pack a lot of information into the posts and also lots of great images.

More on closing main street

Starkville Dispatch does a better job with the closing Main Street story.

Here Chief Lindley seems to be working with the downtown business people, saying something along the lines of "tell me what you want me to do." Also, the article mentions what part of main street is being discussed (Washington to Lafayette, or Washington to Jackson). It also mentions the possibility of street vendors. Guys with hot dog or burrito carts could rake in the cash with both hands. Every game night could be a night to remember!

Scary downtown crowds rattle local merchants

Last Saturday the Starkville Daily news reported on a meeting between members of the Starkville Downtown Business Association and “business and city leaders, law enforcement officials and at least one representative from Mississippi State University,” to address the issue of large crowds gathering downtown late at night and a possible threat to safety. Melissa Dixon, president of the SDBA, wants to bring the possibility of closing downtown streets on game days to the SDBA “to see if they are on board.” The article doesn’t explain what is meant by “closing downtown streets.” It doesn’t address the question of what is currently unsafe about the situation downtown except in this garbled, run-on mess of a sentence: “[merchant concerns] include a few ladies saying they had to go in to an office or shop to work late and were afraid to leave because of the crowd which filled the street and restaurants complain when the street is blocked off and they feel it’s not safe.” Dixon also refers to a recent mugging, for which three people have been arrested. Dixon wants to start a safety committee. Starkville Police Chief David Lindley called street shutdown “an option of last resort.” Lindley explained the current strategy for managing large crowds on Main Street, which includes a combination of foot patrols and video cameras. According to the article, the cameras “record every night from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.” I read the Starkville News every day and find three of four errors like that in every issue.

Police captain Frank Thomas noted that the crowds tend to separate by race and that one night there was a perception that “we were picking on black people.” Officer Thomas is black. I wish that when we see a hundred white college students in the street we could judge them as being every bit as “safe” or “dangerous” as a hundred black college students. For most white people, the hundred black people are always going to look scarier. It shouldn’t be that way. I attended a good number of post-game celebrations (and other large crowd/late night events) in my home town of Chapel Hill, NC, and never felt threatened. In most of these situations the only real danger is somebody is going to trip over something and get hurt.

The strangest comment in the article comes at the end: Bill Kibler, vice president of student affairs at MSU, mentioned another small town that “worked toward a longer-term solution to ‘shift everything back a block.’” What on earth does that mean? Is he talking about moving Mug Shots and Barristers to a point east of the Historic State Theater?

I wonder if letting the bars stay open to 2:00 a.m. would help, people would get tired and the departure times from the bars would be spread out over a longer period, rather than having everyone out at midnight as it is now.

I am going to have to research this further. Our community design professor should give each student $20 drinking money to go out this weekend and find out what is really going on with these crowds.

Read the original article here.

Sugar Shacks

Christian’s post (in his blog land+form+design, there is a link on the sidebar) about the Katrina cottages reminded me of Starkville’s own Sugar Shacks. The Sugar Shacks were one of the first things I noticed about what is sometimes called "vernacular" architecture when I moved to Starkville. The first thing you notice about the Sugar Shacks is that they are small...really really small. Possibly smaller than the Katrina cottages. They are tool-shed sized. The other thing is that the little decks and corrugated tin roof awnings on the front doors actually give them some flair. This feature is important because it is what makes the Sugar Shacks actually tolerable to look at. Each shack has its own two-car concrete parking slab (a slab about equal in area to the footprint of the building it serves) and a dedicated entrance off of North Montgomery Street. Ten units occupy about an acre with about 400 feet of street frontage.



From a sustainable urbanism perspective, the Sugar Shacks could be said to fulfill a few basic principles such as energy efficiency and density, but barely. They would be more efficient if four or five of them had been combined into one building with shared walls. How much privacy would the tenants loose? How much privacy do they have now?

I always get a kind of weird feeling when I look at the Sugar Shacks. The Sugar Shacks were mentioned often in the recent debate about the zoning change for the five acre “pasture” on Yellow Jacket lane. The neighbors who opposed the zoning change invoked them as an example of what would result. The zoning change passed and we will be watching closely to see how right (or wrong) these opponents were.

I thought my blog needed a picture. This is at a gas station at the first exit you come to on I-85 after cross from North Carolina into South Carolina. Now, before you start tearing it apart, let me say right away that the design has issues. There are some problems with proportion, particularly with the footers and steel girders that frame the water feature. But I must say that the reason I took the photo was because overall I was impressed with the effort. Here is a business that took the time to try to do something nice under the sign and actually went so far as to include a little fountain. It is clean and neat and gives the impression that somebody cares.

“I wish we could pass a law that would require people to go to church on Sundays,”

That's what Alderman Roy Perkins said in opposition to the proposed amendment to the alcohol sales ordinance which would allow the sale of alcohol in restaurants and taverns (but not stores) at the Board of Aldermen meeting last night. The amendment passed 4-3, making Sunday sales all but inevitable. You can read the Starkville Dispatch article at the Starkville Now blog here.

The day before the vote, the Starkville Daily News published a letter by William L. Smith which began: "Satan is alive and well as far as the liquor industry and crowd is concerned, but he is a defeated foe, and, sad to say, a lot of good people are going down with him because they know not the truth." The opponents of Sunday sales used rhetoric such as this often and in a way that made it clear that they were actually opposed to the drinking of alcohol anywhere, any time. They tried to back up their opinions with bogus statistics about driving fatalities and even violence against women. Not statistics really, but just assertions.

As a happily married, middle-aged father of two who does most of his drinking at home, I can tell you that I didn't care all that much about Sunday sales. But this is a college town, and the weekend is the weekend. I can tell you that a couple of times we have had out of town guests and have gone out on a Sunday thinking we could eat at a restaurant, forgetting that most of them are closed. Now when Mom and Dad come to town for a game they can stay the whole weekend, because there will be a lot more going on in town. The prohibition on Sunday sales helped Starkville have that "sense of place," (a sense that is diminished now that Outback and Olive Garden are probably now on their way), I think on balance it was a sense that we can afford to lose. The pronouncements of Roy Perkins and those who think like him can be seen as an embarrassment to the town: does he not know that Jews worship on Saturday, and Muslims on Friday? Does he think God will be happy if I sit in a pew on Sunday to fulfill a legal obligation? However he represents a significant and vocal part of the community, as the evidenced by the debate. I think it is a reasonable amendment.

Legalize It

Two former Baltimore City police officers write a column in the Washington Post calling for the legalization of drugs.

(Hey I successfully put in a hyperlink!)

Large areas of our cities have been largely abandoned as a result of the disastrous and unwinnable war on drugs. It's not the drugs themselves, it is the black market, the piles of cash, and the violence that comes with it, that has caused a lot of the problem. The writers of the editorials don't call for legalization across the board, but rather propose to let communities decide for themselves how to regulate drugs. We regulate the sale of alcohol and tobacco as it is. If the states could also manage the sale of narcotics and psychedelics, the results would not be perfect, but would be much better than what we have now. Entire criminal cartels would be out of business over night. There would be far less gun violence, because the criminals would no longer have anything to protect.

Hello? Is this thing on?

Taze, can you hear me? Hello? Austin? Can you turn up my microphone? I'm gonna need a lot more vocal in the monitor. Check. Check. Testing one two. Casey, do you copy? Whisky tango foxtrot. OK this isn't working. Turn me all the way up in the stage monitor please. I'm gonna have to ask you to turn everyone else down.